The First Commandment

According to Gosse, Aposhian said that the night the supposed FBI agents had returned to his home, they had threatened him. They had told him to cease any further inquiries into the John Doe that had been removed from the ME’s office. Aposhian didn’t want any trouble and agreed not to ask any more questions. The problem, as it turned out, wasn’t with Aposhian asking questions, it was with his girlfriend, Rutherford.

The woman smelled something funny and refused to throw in the towel. As far as she was concerned, there was nothing to compel her to obey a pair of fake FBI agents-no matter how convincing they were. What’s more, they had no idea she and Aposhian were an item. All they knew was that she was an investigator in the ME’s office and had run a set of prints for him. As long as she was careful, whoever these clowns were, they’d have no idea what she was up to.

So Rutherford continued to dig. But what she found was far from comforting.

She avoided contacting the police department in Charleston. Rutherford had already reached out to them once and couldn’t help but wonder if they had tipped off the men who had shown up at Frank’s apartment. Instead, she contacted the Charleston coroner’s office.

Based on the backup copy of the ME file she’d made after Aposhian had been visited again by the so-called FBI agents, she had no doubt that her John Doe and the police shootout victim in Charleston were one and the same. What was different, though, was that her stiff had died from a drug overdose-not gunshot wounds.

Deepening the mystery was the fact that an application for exhumation could not be filed for the corpse, as it had already been cremated. When asked who had authorized the cremation, the coroner’s office told her that they didn’t have that information and would have to get back to her.

They never had the chance. Later that night, Rutherford and Aposhian were both killed when they ran a red light and were T-boned by another vehicle.

The fight Gosse had overheard that day sprang from Aposhian’s telling Rutherford to just let the John Doe situation go. Rutherford had uncovered something on the internet, but Aposhian didn’t want to hear about it. He just wanted it all to go away. That was when she had stormed out of her office.

That night at the funeral home, the assistant ME had turned down his friend’s offer of a second tumbler of Maker’s Mark and had called Rutherford on her cell phone. He said he felt terrible about their fight. He agreed to go pick her up, and that was the last time Tom Gosse ever saw him alive.

Gosse was convinced that whoever wanted Aposhian to stop asking questions about the missing John Doe had somehow caused the fatal accident.

Sheppard, though, wasn’t so sure. Using his network of contacts in the Baltimore PD, he spoke to all of the personnel involved in investigating Aposhian’s crash. None of them had any doubt that the accident was anything other than the assistant ME tragically running a red light. There was nothing wrong with the vehicle and Aposhian hadn’t been using his cell phone at the time of impact, but he did have a minor blood alcohol level-something Tom Gosse probably blamed himself for. But at the end of the day, the accident seemed to be Aposhian’s fault. As one of the officers put it, The poor guy simply fucked up.

Be that as it might, Aposhian and Rutherford had both apparently been on to something when they were killed. Throw in a couple of shadowy figures posing as FBI agents and even the biggest cynic would have a hard time ignoring the possibility that some sort of conspiracy might be afoot.

Why use a John Doe from Baltimore to fake a shootout with police in South Carolina?

Sheppard found the beginning of an answer to the question in less than two minutes. Charleston was a small town, especially by metropolitan Baltimore standards, and even more helpful was the fact that their citizens didn’t often get into police shootouts.

He was only halfway through the first newspaper article he’d pulled up on Google when he knew what his next move would be. Mark Sheppard was going to have to go to South Carolina.

Chapter 32

MEXICO

It was a crappy little café in a crappy little Mexican town, but it had halfway decent sandwiches, cold beer, and, unbelievably, a high-speed internet connection.

“Progress,” Philippe Roussard mumbled to himself as he wiped the lip of his bottle of Negro Modelo with his shirt and entered his password.

The setup was quite simple and had been around for quite some time, but with all their technology the Americans had yet to find a way to crack it. Which was why it was perfect.